Fibre Channel (FC) provides practical, inexpensive, expandable means of transferring data between workstations, mainframes, supercomputers, desktop computers, storage devices, displays and other peripherals at fast data rates. Fibre Channel is especially suited for connecting computer servers to shared storage devices and for interconnecting storage controllers and drives.
Fibre channel provides an active intelligent interconnection scheme, called a fabric, to connect devices. Fibre channel ports only have to manage a simple point-to-point connection between itself and another fibre channel device. Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) predominantly transports Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) commands over Fibre Channel networks.
A proxy is a device that acts as an intermediary among two or more devices. Proxies can be used for improving performance, load balancing, management, or adding new functionality. Proxy behavior can be defined as either transparent or non-transparent. A transparent proxy is one for which the proxied devices see no operational difference in their interaction before and after the proxy is interjected. Devices connected through a non-transparent proxy may see no operational difference but may incur some behavioral differences, especially concerning the temporal sequence of events.